May 14, 1948: A Day Of Joy In Israel

Truman Defied His Advisers To Recognize The New Jewish State

May 10, 1998|By Wilbur G. Landrey. Wilbur G. Landrey, a veteran foreign correspondent, covered the United Nations debate on the creation of Israel in 1947 for United Press. Over five decades, Landrey reported with distinction from Latin America, the Middle East, Washington and Europe before retiring in 1997 as the Paris-based foreign correspondent of the St. Petersburg Times. and Tribune photographs by Chuck Berman. Chuck Berman is an award-winning Tribune staff photographer whose work over the last 20 years has ranged from Chicago news to national political conventions. Berman traveled with Tribune writers on assignment to Israel for many of the photographs in this magazine.

Fifty is a time of reckoning and remembrance, for marriages, for birthdays, and so it is for the modern state of Israel as the shofar sounds throughout the land to mark its first half-century of independence.

No one who was present, as I was, during the tense and contentious debates in the fledgling United Nations that led to the birth on May 14, 1948, will ever forget the outburst of both joy and anger that greeted the reappearance of a Jewish state in Palestine nearly 2,000 years after Jews were dispersed to wander in hostile lands.

Fifty years on, Israel is firmly established. No longer is it a David fighting Goliaths; after five victorious wars, Israel itself is Goliath with the life insurance of nuclear weapons.

For Jews and many others, the anniversary is joy relived, but it also comes at a time of questioning and contention about Israel's way forward and even about who is a Jew.

Looking back from the vantage point of 50 years can only rekindle our amazement at all that has happened and at the conflicting claims and emotions that it can still arouse.

But remember! In a brief ceremony in a Tel Aviv museum just after 4 o'clock on that May afternoon, David Ben-Gurion, born David Gruen in Plonsk, Poland, 62 years earlier, solemnly read the declaration of Israel's independence that would take effect with the end of the British Mandate in Palestine at midnight. Except for a two-year hiatus, Ben-Gurion was to lead the Jewish state for the next 15 years.

Eleven minutes after midnight in Jerusalem, at 5:11 p.m. Chicago time, the United States announced its de facto recognition, decided by President Harry Truman against the advice of the State and Defense Departments and America's ally, Britain.

The celebrations began, and so did the fighting, with Arabs determined to reverse what they saw as Jewish usurpation of Arab homes and a land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries.

Scarcely 54 years had passed since the day in January 1894 when Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, witnessed the public humiliation in Paris of a Jewish army captain named Alfred Dreyfus, falsely convicted of treason. So moved and angered was Herzl at the anti-Semitism of the verdict that he founded the Zionist movement for a return to the land from which the Jews had been expelled in 70 A.D. The movement drew adherents primarily from Jews scattered across Europe, who had endured anti-Semitism on the continent for centuries.

During World War I, Britain, in the person of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, had promised the British Zionists led by scientist Chaim Weizmann a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine with the condition that "it did not prejudice the right of the existing inhabitants."

In fact, Palestine was a twice-promised land. While Balfour made his promise to the Zionists to gain Jewish support for Britain in the war effort, other British officials had made what amounted to contradictory promises to win the support of the Arabs.

After the war, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate over the area that contained both an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. And when Zionists began to flow in from Europe, there were several Arab revolts. In 1920, 1929 and 1935-36, Britain had to put down riots and violence.

The rebirth of Israel in Palestine still might not have happened without a far greater crime than the conviction of Dreyfus: the Holocaust, during which Nazi Germany killed 6 million Jews only because they were Jewish, a genocide unique in modern history.

Once Hitler's Germany was defeated in 1945, once the Jewish survivors emerged from the concentration camps, many if not most wanted only to flee from a Europe where they had failed to find a secure place. By now, they had the guilt-ridden sympathy of many who had averted their eyes during the Holocaust. After 50 years, some have finally begun to make amends: France, Switzerland's banks and even the pope and the Catholic Church all have apologized to Jews for their respective conduct toward Jews during the war years.

In vain, Britain tried to limit the influx into Palestine. But Europe's Jews had paid for their reborn state in advance and in blood.

Arab Palestinians, in contrast, felt that they, the innocents, were being made to pay for Hitler's crimes. Confident that they could drive the Jews into the sea, Arab leaders refused all compromise. Theirs was a disastrous decision.

To cut through this controversy after World War II, the young United Nations named a Special Committee on Palestine. Courted by the Zionists and shunned by the Arab governments, its 11 members returned from Palestine with opposing majority and minority reports that led to the dramatic debates in the United Nations and, above all, in both daylight and shadows, a tug-of-war for the mind of Harry Truman.